This year’s Impakt Festival, taking place Octboer 25-29 in Utrecht, Netherlands, is titled “Haunted Machines & Wicked Problems.” The program seeks to address the relationship between technology, religion, magic and the occult. Through the framework of myth, magic and monsters, an international line-up of speakers, performers, thinkers, artists, designers and technologists will address how in magic, the spectacle is used to hide technical processes; in myth, how we build stories and narratives to culturally assimilate complex technologies; and how we use monsters to think about when things go wrong and people are hurt.
For the festival, Professor Washko presents her performances in the fantasy role-playing game “World of Warcraft.” She occupies an avatar to interview other players about their perspectives on feminism, resulting in sometimes humorous, sometimes shocking outcomes. Washko will talk about her work “The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft (2012-2016),” which is on show at Fotodok/Casco. She will additionally present and facilitate an audience-participation based performative play-through of her most recent project “The Game: The Game,” a dating simulator presenting the practices of several infamous pick-up artists.